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That Opensuse you hate so much, has much stonger functional community, not that funny Ubuntu circus based on drove of Shuttleworth sheep. Many important decisions in Opensuse are made by community. important decisions in ubuntu are made by Shuttleworth.

That Opensuse you hate so much brought Build-service for everyone. This is a killer feature, and huge step toward global community, not the opensuse one.

Started using Linux with Mandrake, then switched to Fedora Core after a while. Then when Ubuntu was released, they were certainly making all the right noises for what a desktop distro should be so I switched to it.

And what a breath of fresh air it was to. No longer did I have to fiddle for hours after installation just to get to the point of usable desktop. Most things just worked straight outta the box. It's certainly wasn't perfect, but it was the most perfect distro out there.

After using it for a while, the Ubuntu folk decided to switch from bash to dash for their startup scripts, and this borked the KDE help system. That's when I thought I'd go back to Fedora. Let me say that it wasn't long before I was trying other distros out there only to find that none of the main stream one's were even close.

I think it's fairly clear that Ubuntu have set the standard for ease of use in Linux distros that the others haven't yet matched. I for one am very grateful that Canonical stepped in and finally made ease of use a main priority. The pragmatism in their philosophy in providing for enablement of hardware via closed drivers where it makes sense, and open drivers for everything else, and the ease of installation of closed codecs reflects the reality out there. We can cry and scream against closed standards all we want, but if we want to get work done, and be able to interact with the rest of the computer using world, sometimes that requires interaction with closed standards.

Also, these claims of the Ubuntu team not providing anything for the greater Linux community seem just ridiculous. While we should all be very grateful for the good work of the Redhat, Suse, and IBM devs (just to name a few), we should also be extremely grateful to Cannonical for providing a good dose of common sense to what makes a desktop distro that is not only easy for your garden variety geek to use, but also easy for the non-techs out there.

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Yeah, I don't.
If people want to use it let them use it, but this whole 'we need more users' is basically turning free software into a religion.

I'm not talking about different roles, I understand that Ubuntu is aimed at a different audience, but they don't give back much to anything except themselves.

It's difficult to argue with trolls without exaggerating a bit

The most important things are open standards and documentation.
One example is our stupid database system, why not use MySQL? Managers decision and now nobody knows what the software actual does or the database looks like.
That's why free and open software is good. The more people the more donations for example and the the more it is used the more bugreports, testing and upstream...

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Also, these claims of the Ubuntu team not providing anything for the greater Linux community seem just ridiculous. While we should all be very grateful for the good work of the Redhat, Suse, and IBM devs (just to name a few), we should also be extremely grateful to Cannonical for providing a good dose of common sense to what makes a desktop distro that is not only easy for your garden variety geek to use, but also easy for the non-techs out there.

Yeah, sure. BUT.
Canonical is one of the companies with enough resources to actively contribute to upstream development, and that's a fact. That would make things better for everyone, including Ubuntu users, and that's another fact.
Contributing would also clear Ubuntu's name from the accusation of parasitic behaviour and make it better accepted by other Linux users and a real part of the Linux community, which could be a smart marketing move.

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@squirrl and mugginz: my sentiments exactly. The difference with Ubuntu is that it works out of the box, without fiddling for hours, dealing with broken dependencies, missing drivers and so on and so forth.

Even a Windows user can pop-in the installation cd, run the installer and reboot into a fully functional Ubuntu installation 10 minutes later. The system boots fast, looks pretty, comes with all necessary software preinstalled or installed-on-demand (e.g. codecs) and the whole experience feels like a breath of fresh air.

I've managed to convert about 75% of my close circle of friends to part- or full-time Ubuntu users, simply by guiding them through the installation procedure. One of them proceeded to install Arch half a year later, and the rest are still using Ubuntu today. Had I tried to guide them to Fedora or openSUSE instead... they'd still be using Windows.

The point is that Ubuntu aspires to be a simple to install, use and maintain distribution. It is not a software testbed like Fedora nor a power-user distro like Arch or Gentoo. Judging them by the number of kernel contributions is missing the point: usability is what they are after and they have managed to surpass every other distro in that - which is why they have by far the largest userbase on desktop Linux today.

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How do you measure this? Only teen kiddies screaming ubuntu rulezz in every discussion are counted? What about commercial customers?

"How do *I* measure this"? "Teen kiddies screaming Ubuntu rulezz"? Hey, are you serious or are you just playing the dumbass?

There is no way how to make a clear statistics. Ubuntu is trendy. That's why ubuntu users are most visible. But most visible does not mean most numerous automatically.

The most comprehensive usage statistics I am aware of are the ones on distrowatch.com and counter.li.org. Interestingly, both place Ubuntu at the first place, which matches my personal experience (I only now two people personally who prefer another distro over Ubuntu).

Scientific? Hell no. Even so, there *is* evidence and it all points to the same conclusion: Ubuntu has eclipsed previous powerhouses like Fedora and Debian.

That said, I'd love to hear if you have a more scientific way to gather stats.

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The most comprehensive usage statistics I am aware of are the ones on distrowatch.com and counter.li.org.

Oh Yaeh. I expected some stupidity like that. Do you know, how the statistics like distrowatch are made? It count number of visits on each distro page on distrowatch site. So it depends on people, reading distrowatch.

Only idiot would think, that distrowatch.com has same popularity among ubuntu, and lets say Gentoo users. Average RHEL user never visited distrowatch at all. So aplying these statistics to the universe is naive.

Interestingly, both place Ubuntu at the first place, which matches my personal experience (I only now two people personally who prefer another distro over Ubuntu).

How many Linux users do you know? Personally? Via Internet? Let me tell you one important thing. I met in discussions users of varied distributions. What about average RHEL user? Do you think, he would vote in your "the best linux distro survey"? No. He would tell you to go fuck yourself with such a stupid task, having other important things to do. What do you expect? Everybody is happy and ready to omen his distro religion? Oh come on! Wake up.

Ass I said, I know many user of many distros. But only ubuntu users are always ready exited to state their distro applicability everywhere. because it is IN. It is trendy and cool.

So. Give me some Linux vendor statistics, for example number of repository users. It is not so easy. It is almost imposible. But it is not based on stupid hypothesis that distro with the highest number of loudest idiots is the most used in the universe.